


Scars and tattoos

by kenwayallgetalong



Series: Scars and tattoos [1]
Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: Backstory! Elena, Defining scars, Elenate, Established Relationship, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, First Meetings, Scars and tattoos, Scars and tattoos AUish, Young! Sully, slight Charlie Cutter x Chloe Frazer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-04 12:52:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6658603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenwayallgetalong/pseuds/kenwayallgetalong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They all have scars. Business like this, it’s inevitable. Tattoos too. These are the stories behind them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nathan Drake

**Author's Note:**

> DISCLAIMER-I do not own any of these characters.

Nate’s body is littered with scars. Jagged white marks cut into his tanned skin. They all have a story behind them, and Elena just loves trailing her hands over them and asking the story behind each one. He usually obliges her, except for a few, one that she knows the story behind, and two others he can’t stand remembering.

There’s an ugly grey circle punched through his left side, just above his hip, with a matching exit wound on the other side, the flesh around it puckered and wrinkled.

It hurt for a few weeks after, but the pain eventually subsided, and he rarely feels the pull in his left side when he’s climbing. Still, when he undresses, or his shirt rides up, he’ll sometimes catch a glimpse of it, and it’s hard not to forget the man who he thought was his friend, though Harry Flynn was long gone before he pulled that trigger.

Above that, there’s a straight pale line drawn across his ribs, and a similar one on his left bicep. Both scratches at the time, they barely bothered him. One from a knife drawn across his chest, fighting in the middle of a collapsing Ubar, and another a bullet fired in the catacombs of a French chateau. Both from Talbot.

That’s why he hates them. Because they were both gained from his obsession with Drake, and now he can barely stand to remember the man he was during that long downward spiral he very nearly didn’t escape from.

His tattoo has a similar story. After he left Elena (the second time), hiding out at Sully’s, drinking half the time and researching Drake’s quest through the East Indies the rest, he was in a bad place. Not that he’d ever admit it. And his fucking ring, hanging round his neck, constantly tormenting him with his failure. _You really thought you were Francis Drake’s descendant didn’t you? Pathetic._

In a haze of anger, he stormed out, found the nearest tattoo parlour he could, and made his request.

It’s not until after Ubar, when he’s accepted his name and lost the ring, when he takes his watch off and remembers the drunken mistake. Elena notices, and before he can hide it, she has his left wrist in her hand, reading the words ‘sic parvis magna’, tidily written in a thick font.

While he’s trying to lie and guess how much tattoo removal costs, Elena raises it to her lips and kisses his wrist. “He’d be proud, Nate.” She tells him. And finally, holding her in his arms, he finally feels like he has achieved greatness.


	2. Victor Sullivan

Being in the game for over twice as long as Nate has, and his time in the Navy, Sully’s got a fair collection of scars and tattoos. He remembers his first tattoo, because it matches up with the collection of scars across his back. 

From a young age, Victor Sullivan knew he wanted excitement and adventure, and with a father who wanted a studious and hardworking son, the two rarely saw eye to eye. Sully rebelled against his control from a young age, and his father responded the only way he knew how, because it’s how he’d been raised. Sully got the belt more often than any other beatings his father could administer, but he gritted his teeth and said nothing. 

When he announced he’d skipped school that day and had gone to the enlistment office, his father flipped, and Sully can still remember the bite of his belt buckle as it dug into his back. He packed a bag and hid out at his cousin’s house that same night, knowing he would ship out to boot camp in less than a week. As a final act of rebellion, and commemorating his new life, he went out that night and got an anchor tattooed on his right bicep. Simple, sure. Cliché? Hell yeah. 

He gained a few more in the Navy, including a mermaid on the small of his back (which Nate never lets him forget), and a skull and crossbones on his right shoulder (yes, cliché. Again.) But the anchor was his first, and in the first few difficult months with Nate, when he was trying so hard to be a parent to this angry child without telling him that, he would glance at the anchor, or remember the bite of the belt in his back, raise a hand to his bicep or nonchalantly scratch his back, and hold tight for a moment, remembering his own father, and promising that he’ll never, ever, do that to Nate.

There’s another scar he remembers the story behind. A small, jagged white circle on his palm. That day in Cartagena, when he first met Nate, had a few memorable moments. He remembers sprinting across the tiled rooftops, running faster than he’d run in years, shoving Marlowe’s men aside as they tried to stop that scared kid. In one moment of desperation, he shoved one of them through a window, and it wasn’t until later that he noticed the cut on his palm. 

It healed pretty easy, but whenever he felt lost, or was never sure where to turn, his right hand would close and he’d feel the rough scar, remember that day on the rooftops of Cartagena, and realise that he’d made one good choice in his life, when he found a small, scared, bleeding kid, and took him in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you guys like it! Let me know what you think, and the next chapter'll be Elena!


	3. Elena Fisher

Elena wouldn’t exactly call her body flawless; the glamourous life of an investigative journalist means she’s been in more than enough scrapes to earn a few battle scars. Still, when she spends most of her days around international thieves and fortune hunters, their marks usually have more interesting stories than “that goddamn intern has no clue how to use the safety on a gun”.

Her trump card though, is the jagged marks all down her front. Some are tiny nicks, barely bigger than a dime, while the biggest is the size of her fist. Sully jokes it’s what makes her and Nate such a great couple, that they’ve both had brushes with death from the same asshole, and if that doesn’t bring people together, what will, but it’s still terrifying to remember the dull clink of the grenade as it hit the temple floor, and the subsequent blinding flash. 

She hates them.

Despite Chloe’s assumptions of her ‘wholesomeness’, Elena has a tattoo as well, much to everyone’s surprise. It’s tiny though, and few people have seen it. Even fewer know the story behind it. 

After her parents died, Elena, being the oldest Fisher, had taken charge of the family, holding her siblings close while planning their funerals and selling the house to pay off their debt. They hadn’t even made a will, so her oldest brother took her dad’s old car, and the other took his old tools. Her sisters took their mother’s book collection, and once everything was sold or put into storage, Elena looked around the house they’d spent their lives filling with happy memories and love and care, and cried. 

They’d all moved out before, except her youngest sister, who went to live with their aunts in Philadelphia, and when they all leave, and Elena returns to Colorado, before she realises she has nothing to remember them by. In a fit of grief, she goes out to the nearest tattoo parlour, and gets their initials, R.F and M.B, written in tiny, beautiful calligraphy, on her inner left ring finger. 

It helps, just a little bit. When she later marries Nate, and he slides the ring on her finger, she almost cries, because Nate is just the perfect husband for her and the perfect son for them. When he leaves, and she wakes up to an empty bed, she can barely summon the strength to pull the ring off.

Later, when she goes to Yemen, and Nate taunts her for ‘still wearing it’, she brushes him off, saying that it helps to avoid unwanted attention in this part of the world. She can’t tell him that despite it all, she still loves him, and a tiny part of her can’t bear to see the tiny letters on her skin if she takes the ring off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is pretty much my headcanon for Elena's past-as we're not given much outside of the main story.


	4. Chloe Frazer

Being ‘the best driver in the business’ means she usually spends most of the time sitting in a car three streets away from where the others are breaking into, playing Words with Friends with someone a continent away. 

It also should mean she is somewhat safe, and has next to no scars.

If only. 

Chloe’s body is absolutely covered with scars, but it’s never bothered her. 

Only when whoever she was sleeping with tried to be all suave by trailing their fingers over them would she find a way to distract them. That, she hated. 

There are a few scrapes and grazes from bullets that didn’t quite kill her but still hurt like a bitch.

Her climbing skills leave something to be desired, and so she has a few peppered marks from nasty falls onto gravel, or jagged white marks from leaping through glass. 

There’s a particularly nasty collection across her forearms from when she leaped between two buildings in Berlin, and just managed to cross her arms before she broke the glass with her face. 

There’s an ugly line down her right arm, gained from a broken bottle and a particularly vicious suitor (and his mates) after an ugly bar brawl in Adelaide after she told them to “fuck off and leave me to my drink” (coincidentally, the same night she met Charlie. It was hard to miss the big, earnest Brit who broke one of the thugs nose’s when he smashed a pool cue across their face). 

More ugly ones down her front gained from car crashes when the glass shattered over her.

Her tattoos, much like her scars, are numerous and meaningful, but she’ll never tell anyone the story about them.

She has a small rose, wrapped with thorns on her upper thigh which she got when she was sixteen, angry and wanting to burst out of the bubble her parents had decreed for her and her sister. 

When she came to London when she was eighteen, and started driving for the gangs there, one of them tried to make her tattoo a flaming skull on the back of her hand (the gang’s symbol). 

She refused, and later broke his nose when he turned violent, though she did like the flaming skull idea, and later got it put on her Colt, just to remind her where she began. 

After that particular incident, she got another set of thorns twisting up her left arm. When she first met Charlie Cutter, he almost nicknamed her Thorns after seeing that, but she managed to change his mind. 

“Bright Eyes” however, stuck, much to her dislike. 

On the nape of her neck, she has a tiny bird, spreading its wings in flight, and on her left wrist, a small collection of stars.

Years later, she tells Charlie the story of her tattoos, while she’s lounging in his flat in London, bored, and he responds by rolling up his sleeves to expose an entire tattoo sleeve on both of his arms, starting at the shoulders and coming right down to his wrists. 

Being the dork he is, he has three Shakespeare quotes on his body (one on his back, one on his arm, and another in an undisclosed location), a revolver on the back of his neck, and on his chest, “Per ardua ad astra”, which he later tells her is in memory of his mother. 

Years after that, when Chloe finally decides she’s had enough of running around the world and just wants somewhere to be, she proposes to Charlie, at which point he chokes on his tea and later cries laughing when she brings it up. 

They both don’t want anything big, just their friends there with them to cheer and laugh with them, but they do one small thing for each other. 

Despite all the bad memories their misadventure in Syria holds for them, Chloe still remembers it as when she realised she loved Charlie, when he was standing on that burning tower and she almost lost him. 

Finally, to bury it together, they get a shared phrase tattooed on their inner wrist, Chloe getting the first half, Charlie the second. 

Quod est superius, est sicut quod est inferius. 

As above, so below.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This turned into blatant Cutter x Chloe and I regret absolutely nothing.


End file.
